The Northern Ireland Minister of Finance, Mr Mark Durkan, made history yesterday as he presented the first Budget at Stormont for almost 30 years.
The Minister has been in office for only just over a week and thus there were no changes to the already agreed Budget drawn up in Whitehall. To do otherwise would have been "political joyriding", as Mr Durkan pointed out.
But yesterday was still likely to be the start of a process which will see profound changes for Northern Ireland economically as well as politically.
The Minister will now be getting down to the task of negotiating the next Programme for Government. The seeds of that may have been laid yesterday but all proposals will have to be agreed by the Executive. Mr Durkan insisted, however, that devolution will make a difference.
One problem - as Mr John Bradley, research professor of the Economic and Social Research Institute, pointed out - is that the new administration does not have a lot of room for manoeuvre. The plans include a total of £8.9 billion sterling for public services and of that figure, the Assembly has discretion over about £5 billion. The rest is needed for items such as social security benefits and the EU Peace Programme.
As a result the Budget is largely the division of funds between different Departments of amounts which have already been ringfenced. There is provision for new costs arising from the operations of the Assembly, the new Departments, the North-South bodies, the North-South Ministerial Council, the Civic Forum and the Equality Commission.
But, for the future, Mr Durkan will have his work cut out for him. He will not only have to get cross-party support for spending plans, but also deal with the possible fall-off in funding from London and with the challenge of making the economy more high tech and service oriented.
The amount of money at the Minister's disposal is determined by Whitehall on a pre-agreed formula which is also used for the devolved assemblies in Scotland and Wales.
In Northern Ireland, the total subvention is more than £3 billion; of that, up to £2.5 billion can be used by the Assembly for public spending. The rest is mostly at the disposal of the Northern Ireland Office and under London's control for expenditure under headings ranging from defence to the RUC.
The priority, as the Minister said yesterday, is the need to ensure that Northern Ireland continues to receive a "fair and acceptable" total share of the Chancellor's cake.
But partly because the level of subvention is higher in Northern Ireland than in Scotland or Wales, this is an area which is likely to cause difficulties in the future.
The subvention makes up to 25 per cent or 30 per cent of the North's GDP. Almost one-third of that is made up of monies which may not be forthcoming in the future, such as additional RUC and prison officers' salaries. The loss of a large part of that subvention is, of course, a contentious issue and will be dominated by how large a consideration Mr Durkan and his fellow ministers manage to retain in negotiations with the UK Treasury.
Future development is also to some extent limited, as Northern Ireland does not have the power to increase taxes. But, as Mr Durkan pointed out, if it did the Treasury could simply take this into account and change the subvention accordingly.
However, there has been some pressure to cut corporation tax rates to levels close to those in the Republic. But there are issues for many unionists in "deharmonising the UK tax code".
There are other problems, too. Mr Durkan also pointed out that personal tax rates are lower in Northern Ireland than in the Republic. Overall, he said, changing the tax system is not something which would be easily facilitated. "The Treasury would not be the only difficulty." That is most likely true and the Scottish Development Board, for one, is likely to be very unenthusiastic about any movement downwards in Northern Irish corporate taxes.
These are issues for the future which may see Northern Ireland attracting substantial foreign investment as the Republic hits capacity.
Some hint that this may be a new focus appeared in the Budget. The Industrial Development Board is seeing a 7 per cent reduction in its funding for 2000/20001 from this year's out-turn. In contrast, education saw an increase of some 15 per cent.
According to the ESRI's Mr Bradley, this may mark a turn away from the old strategy of simply giving grants to companies to come in, whether or not they fit the future industrial development strategy.